The tragedy for Nigerians is that no one can tell which food is GMO or non-GMO
Nigerians don’t have that luxury of a choice.
No labels, no functioning regulatory body.
We just eat everything we see. We can’t differentiate.
In Nigeria, we teach students to pass exams, not to solve problems. That’s why Nigeria has millions of graduates but few builders.
Our schools are factories for certificates — not innovation.
General Ibrahim Babangida has finally spoken after almost 27 years, but does his version of history align with the truth? In this week's column, I explored his claims, specifically his attempt to reshape the narrative and shift blame for one of Nigeria's most significant political betrayals. Rather than accountability, we saw deflection. Rather than honesty, we got selective memory.
Can a leader change history to avoid being judged? This piece reminds us why we can not edit the past for our own convenience.
Read the full article here 👇🏽 https://t.co/iCZJxMTG7V
Oh, and one more thing that I think our Nigerian USAID mourning class needs to understand: We are not Westerners.
I'll say that again for emphasis.
We are NOT Westerners.
You might speak their English and French, practise their Christianity, wear their Saville Row suits and Parisian perfumes, take their geopolitical instructions and NGO funding, involve yourself in their culture wars and red vs blue politics, use all of their trending buzzwords, adopt their social causes...heck you can even physically move to their countries, obtain their citizenship, and marry into their bloodlines.
It changes nothing. You're just a monkey in a suit.
You are African. You are not from the West. The West is not your home and it does not identify with you. Its interests are not your interests - and even if you don't know where your interests lie, it certainly does. No amount of work you put into aligning yourself with oyibo will ever make oyibo's interests align with yours. You are and will always be to them, a (well-trained) monkey in a suit. At best they will like you. But liking individual natives has never stopped oyibo from exterminating the natives' entire civilisation.
So it's better that you accept the reality of your Africanness, and align your life choices with that reality. That's what I did 2 years ago, after wasting a lot of useful time trying to see and engage with the world through a Western prism. Since I accepted reality and stopped being a monkey in a suit, life has become more streamlined, and I've gained the ability to always see what is there, not what someone told me to think is there.
Stop fighting civil wars inside your head and trying to be what you fundamentally can never be. Grieve your lost time and wasted effort, them move on.
Life is too short to waste it on being a monkey in a suit.
Here's an idea:
Instead of training a new generation of Nigerians to spend their lives being monkeys in suits just like their parents, perennially striving to be who and what they are not - and doomed to fail miserably at it - why not try something different?
Why not look at the data and see that Nigeria is already the world's 3rd largest English-speaking country, and will be the 2nd largest by the time these kids are 40, so instead of teaching them to desire to be other people, you teach them that they are important enough to be the centre of their own world?
How about you teach them that their country is destined to be a very important country in the world and that their generation will be the most important in its history, so they should focus on history, economics, commerce, geopolitics, STEM, energy, government and defence?
How about you teach a new generation of Nigerians to see themselves as people who deserve to have a seat at the table with the rest of the world as they are, and not caterpillars who must shed something about their identity before they can blossom into global butterflies?
Why are you teaching Nigerian kids that there is something undesirable about the way they talk? Why are you still passing on your low self-esteem and generational trauma to these innocent children? What did they do to deserve this?